November 2008
14 posts
not half bad
“Thus when the ambitious man whose watchword was “Either Caesar or nothing”3 does not become Caesar, he is in despair thereat. But this signifies something else, namely, that precisely because he did not become Caesar he now cannot endure to be himself. So properly he is not in despair over the fact that he did not become Caesar, but he is in despair over himself for the...
I’m at that weird point in my life where I get more kicks out of symptomatic complexity than crafted complexity [in artifacts]. Whatever.
Accidental late-Dada poetry [title only]
I'm extra realizing
why I don’t like Charles Bernstein. His work is all about putting an end to the rumor that he was a teenager. He’ll be out-habitus-ed over his cold, dead body.
Yet a certain activity of mind however slight is a...
no wonder i’m never rested
I dare you all to come up with a pun that’s not on google
You know the Vampire Weekend video that’s either Godard or Anderson? It’s only barely not worthwhile to essay-ize on what it means that conditions are perfect for this indeterminacy, or on how little hermeneutic difference it (the indeterminacy) makes. Quickly: the collapse of ideology into identity. Godard & Anderson may point in opposite directions but the root of both arrows is...
Thesis: there’s more “obviously” & “of course” in high-Theory [the in-house, vintage stuff — your Benjamins and De Mans] than in basically anything else.
I swear the part where they’re all standing together after the speech was patterned after the final scene from Star Wars Episode IV.
I am *not* qualified to talk about dialectics but let’s pretend I am: The Man Without Qualities is the opposite because it’s a refusal of immanence. The point-counterpoint movement is lateral rather than dialectic — it’s a chain of points of views that supersede one another by trivialization, making what was salient in the world from one trivial from the other. They...
oh have pity for the greeks, the one peoples to not have the option of using a greek term to make a concept fancy.
Which all seems to imply
that I’m more impressed with Davidson’s Metaphor piece than I thought that I am — evidently I too think that “speaker meaning” is so infinite that we really better not think of it as a second layer of denotative content. I’m not sure this is happy news for denotative content.
And by that
I have solved the paradox of literary interpretation — deriving from the illusory contradiction between 1) “meaning” of a work being not its denotation but its connotation when interpreted for implicated world view same as any other act can be interpreted for an implicated world view 2) the work still being also a text the “meaning” of which is its denotation —...
Three things that need reconciling: the reducibility of the language one speaks to an idiolect, the ubiquity of deferential content, and the lack of individual control over connotation [as in De Man’s surprisingly good discussion of “Pain et Vin” vs. “Bort und Wein]. Actually the first and last of these can maybe give a great distinction between denotation and connotation...
